The System Crash - Secede from the banking system

Foreign. Okay, we are joining everyone, all of the, the people watching us right now on the Facebooks, the YouTubers and we're having a bit of a conversation. I got my friend Roman here. And earlier today we were talking about, you know, this little thing that happened in Canada. One of the largest telecommunications networks went down. You may have heard about in the news. There's this little company called Rogers and it seemed to create a little bit of havoc with a lot of people not having access to their phones or communication devices, the network, their ability to interact, getting online, watching YouTube, all the things that we do on a daily basis because we're basically glued to one of these little devices pretty much all day long. And it definitely created a lot of chaos. And I think for many people, it, it created some eye opening moments for them to recognize the system, the system that we work within. We have a lot of faith and a lot of dependency on that system just in the telecommunications area. But even like, you know, nowadays, I know people, Roman, and you probably do too. They do all of their banking, even their investment transactions, things of that nature. They're doing it right here on this device. And the moment this device isn't connected to the network, they're. They're disconnected from things like their money, their transactions, their stock portfolio, all of this activity. And it could be very, very unsettling when something like that happens. What, what have you discovered in conversations you've had with people?

Yeah, thank you, Richard. You know, definitely I noticed that it was something like out of ordinary where, when Canada actually went in a panic mode, basically because the mo. Like lots of people, lots of Canadians got disconnected from the real world. Meaning that even though they could do some things, but they were restricted in the other things. For example, ATM machines got disconnected. Even some huge outlets and shops got, they only accepted, you know, credit. They said we don't accept debit. So for me it was like, you know, an eye opening as well where I, I realized so that the dependency on the electronic transaction system is far like larger than I actually imagined. I, I only thought that this company is only dealing with, you know, cell phones. That's it. But in fact, lots of, you know, points of sale and lots of merchants, lots of businesses are dependent on fast Internet and fast communication. And you know, I had, I had this little, you know, like a, what's it called? It's, it's like a, like saying that I had in my house that some restaurants and some cafeterias, they have those. It says we don't have WI fi here. Talk to each other, pretend it is 1995. And I think that all Canada pretended it was 1995 last week, right? Or beginning of this week. So we pretended that nothing existed. So nothing like no cell phone existed, no Internet existed. So how do we survive in the world like that? And you know, Richard, so my clients often ask me, hey, Roman, you know we are talking about seceding from the banking system, right? So when we open banking policies, when we open infinite banking concept, when we implement this, but still, the policy loan, when I take a policy loan, where does it go? Can I use it to buy groceries? No, it has to be deposited first in the bank. So we, in fact, we're still using banks and then we're using banks for the convenience of debit. So yes, we do not store our money, we don't keep our money in banks, but we rely on banks still for the convenience of debit, for the transactions, for the E transfers, for many things that we find convenient. And you mentioned also online banking, right? And there's lots of things apparently that may go wrong in our communication between the insurance company, between accessing capital. So the capital is growing, right? No question. Even if we did get disconnected, what happens to our capital, Richard?

Still growing?

Yeah, it's still growing. Right. But still, in order for us to access this capital, there's lots of things that may go wrong. And wanted to kind of talk about, well, wanted to talk about how do we prevent not having access to capital? How do we think in advance what we should do in order to not only have our capital working for us, but also have access to it when we most did it? There's lots of things that may go wrong. For example, you may be disconnected from cell phones, from Internet, even to apply for policy. What do you need, Richard?

Yeah, I mean you, you really, what you need fundamentally, you need to be able to contact the life company and verify your identity. So sometimes by the telephone, that can be done. Or you can, you can request a policy loan with snail mail. You know, you can send a courier to, with a loan request and send that in. So there's ways of doing it without, you know, you can use physical paper, you can send it in, you can do a letter of direction and sign it and date it. And you know, even if you need to have someone witness that document and send it in, so there's still ways to access the money from the life company. The life company has rules. They, they have a method that they do things. And you know, before electronic transactions, before the Internet existed, people were still taking policy loans and they would receive a check. They would be a check sent in the mail. That was the way, the way things used to work, used to operate. And so nothing really is changing there. We're simply changing kind of the. It might be a little bit slower, but we're still able to get it done. And ultimately that's really what matters. That's what we're focusing on. That's what we're helping people understand. They have the ability to do it regardless.

Yeah, I don't know. What if your video is still on?

Yeah, I'm just swapping it over because one camera is not working. So we'll go to camera two.

Okay. Yeah, you know what? So let me go on with this. So statistically, 60% purchases in Canada are done by using credit or debit cards. So we are very dependent on using plastic nowadays and very few people use cash. And in our society. So our society is moving towards, you know, being cash cashless. Right. So we are trying to kind of go away from using cash. And this is where we have some, some digital risks. Right. We have some risks of not being able to access our money, not being able to access our cash. So what we wanted to address. Richard, I'm not sure if you're still on your video.

Yeah, I'm still here. I'm just getting a camera working again.

Okay. Okay.

You know, modern technology works most time. Most times, but not every time. Maybe it's because I suddenly got connected to the Rogers network. I don't know.

It could be. Yeah, so. So people say cash is king, but you know, right now very few people carry cash with them. Right. So but, but when we see this happening, when we see that we are very dependent and the companies don't really support us as we want them to support us, like for 100% of the time, we want to be online, we want to be connected. We want to be, you know, we want to have access to those banks and their accounts and have access to our money. Even when we deposited a check in a bank, we want to have access to it immediately. I'll give you an example. So some of you may know that we just came back with my mom, she's Ukrainian, I brought her into Canada and we just opened up an account for her with one of big banks in Canada. It's kind of red bank. You may know what I'm talking about. And we opened an account online. But when I went. So we just needed to go to a branch and then show her passport just to confirm her Identity. Guess what? The branch was closed because of the fire that happened at the same street one day ago. There was like a huge massive fire in Steinbeck, Manitoba. And when the fire was down, all the businesses around, around that, that block was actually were closed for. For whole week just because of the smoke hazard. You know, smoke and toxic, toxic gases and stuff like that. So even, even just confirming your identity, not even. I'm not, not even talking about accessing funds. Maybe, maybe challenging when you, when you rely on, you know, on system like, like banks and so you want to have access to liquidity when you have it. Because guess what? Do the bills wait till you access your cash? No, the bills have to be paid on time. They have to be paid on the 5th of the month, on the 15th of the month. So you have to have this cash liquid ready somehow accessible. Even in the case of emergency, you have to have access to cash. So tip number one, what I wanted to say is take your policy loans well in advance. We all know that we want to flow our expenses through our policy loans. Tip number one, take your policy loans well in advance. Give it extra time in order to have the policy loan ready when you need it. We know that the insurance company processes policy loan requests within three to five business days, but it may take weeks, right? So sometimes when we have like outages like this, you may literally need to send them a loan request by. By mail and then accept.

Sorry.

Expect a check coming in by mail which may takes. Which may take. Sorry. Which may take two or maybe two and a half weeks. Right? So. Or maybe we can keep some cash at home and just to rely on cash, because if we know how many bills where we need to pay, we may need to account for that. We may need to plan for that. We need many just to have cash handy just in case we need to pay those bills. Maybe just go to the Manitoba Hydro, whatever it is, and they just pay your. Somehow pay your bill on time, right. Or go to another branch, another bank and then just so that I don't get hit by the nsfe, right. Or something like that. So if I don't have.

Yeah, you're right, Roman. And in fact, a really good thing for people to tune into on this is there's a great webinar recording that was done a few years ago, but everything in it is very applicable to today. And it was done by Robert Murphy, Dr. Robert Murphy and Carlos Lara. They are two of the board of directors of the Nelson Nash Institute. And so they have a website called the lara murphy, lara murphy.com and in fact, I'll put the website link here in the chat for everybody. They should be able to see that in the comment section. This one goes directly to the spot that I'm referencing. And so they've merged everything to the main website on infinitebanking.org which is the website for the Nelson Nash Institute. And they did this a few years ago again. But everything that they talk about is a hundred percent relevant to what, you know, this Rogers instance or some of the other economic uncertainty and concerns that people have. I mean, I speak to people on a regular basis that they are legitimately concerned. They're concerned about how governing bodies, how global economies, how large multinational organizations are implementing structures and things that may hinder or create some kind of an issue with, with the currency that you're accustomed to. And so, you know, we see the advent of technologies like the different kinds of cryptocurrencies. Right now those markets are in the tank as well. But the fundamental basis of how they're designed or what their, their, their intention is is around giving people an opportunity to separate from the system, much like are the insurance policies are. And so in this presentation, they talk a lot about what's called Extra's pyramid of collapsing values. And, and where people, you know, you know, there's like this stack and where people, it's actually inverted where people go down towards, you know, typically things like gold and silver and precious metals that are physical in nature. And you know, if I want a chicken to feed my family and I, you know, and I don't have chickens and I don't have pigs or anything like that, maybe I don't even have a garden. Probably not a bad idea to figure that out. One of the reasons I moved to Tillback is because there's lots of fresh stuff I could just go get from a local farmer. But, you know, I can, if I go to that local farmer, you know, if I don't have something of value that they will accept, I won't be able to trade. Okay, so maybe I know how to fix lawnmowers and I can fix their lawnmower, or maybe I have a skill that they need and we can barter over that. Ultimately. The currency that we use today in Canada, Canadian currency, it's, it's bright blue and pink and various colors. This is all it does, is it solves the speed transaction of how you and I might trade for goods and services. So again, if I go to the car mechanic and I need to rotate my tires and do an oil change and get an air filter and fix my transmission. That mechanic will accept something of value. What he knows of value is the Canadian currency that he charges. But if I can add some other value, like maybe one thing that he really needs is he needs a way to market his business and build a system that automates so he can reduce his cost of employed staff or, or optimize the growth of his business. Well, if I can bring that skill set to him, perhaps him and I can create a new arrangement where I will provide services in retrade for services that'll take longer. But ultimately everything that we do on a day to day basis transactionally we don't see it, but effectively that's what's happening. The difference is we're utilizing a currency mechanism that is well known and consistent, consistent across the board that allows us to do that at lightning speed. And so talking about extras pyramid of collapsing values, you know, Roman, you and I were talking about things like gold and silver. So you know, here I have a Canadian silver coin. It's a Canadian maple leaf coin. This one is a five dollar coin. It's 99.99 pure. You can see a little bit, you know, quadruple nine on there. I have another one that I also like. These ones, they're good. These are an Austrian coin. Again, very, very similar kind of structure.

Nice. And is it so silver?

It is silver, yeah, yeah, you bet. Yeah. These are both, both silver. You actually should be able to see it says silver on there. I don't know if the glare can show it or not, but you know, so I have these in, you know, in these little things here. These are a sleeve and typically I think this one's got 25 in it. And I can't remember, I think this one has 25 as well, or 20, you know, so like myself and I know a lot of other people, I know a lot of clients, I have friends and colleagues. Well, they will have a, a format of bullion in some format where it's usually physical. Now you know, Nelson, even he would tell a story about this back in, back in the day. And although he was fond of this thing, it wasn't he, he recognized that it didn't matter in the same way that his policies mattered because he can't control the market price. But I don't have these things as really as an investment. I, I have these things so that in the event we have a short term, you know, currency related crisis, people will go to the collapsing values and they will look to find A way to conduct business in the short term period, maybe it's a month, two months, three months, six months, maybe it's one year. As the world kind of figures its way back through and we get back to some, you know, whatever some format of normal is, not unlike we've done through Covid, but just more in relation to how the currency moves through the marketplace. And so if I have enough of these in place, well, I can go and exchange it with a farmer and I can maybe I can't get a whole cow. But typically in a situation like that, the value of these things also goes up proportionately because that value is based on a supply and demand. So the demand goes way up and so the people that have supply, what I can exchange this for today versus in a situation where the currency is not doing so great, what I might be exchange it for at that point in time might be a much higher value. Maybe this will get me a whole cow, or it'll get me a quarter of a cow that I can put in my freezer and feed my family. So, you know, I'm not trying to suggest that everyone just run down to the your corner pawn shop and go buy a bunch of gold and silver, but understand that how you have money flow and if these are things you're actually concerned about, you should be getting some education on what are some things that you can do to protect yourself in that environment. And the only thing I would suggest is that if you're going to go acquire something of this nature and you're going to be changing how you hold some of your currency, what we're doing is removing it from Canadian paper electronic currency into tubes of silver coins or gold bars or what, like whatever that thing is that you want to use. I mean, gold bars are cool and all, except like, you know, I've got a little remote here. And if this was like a gold bar, it's kind of hard for me to go down and just shave off some into a scale at the car mechanic and say, okay, is that enough? You know, meanwhile the car mechanics looking at this gold bar like, no, that's not enough. You know, I wouldn't want to be walking around town with this lugging, you know, 20 pound gold bar around. Right? So, you know, things to think about.

Yeah, exactly. So, yes, gold is great. It's kind of, it's kind of real money. It is divisible, but it is not divisible to the point where you can, you know, chip away enough to buy, you know, bread or to buy milk. Right. So there has to be some replacement for gold or some, some, some universal exchange for gold so that we use it. That's, that's, that's how the banking system, you know, came to, came to life. And so having, having gold and silver at home or having access to liquidity at home is also basically seceding from banking system. Right? Because you're not keeping that money in a bank where you, things may go wrong and you may not have access to it. And then the things that may go wrong actually not just, not just you know, communication outages. It's like earthquakes, right, or hurricanes if, if that, if those hit and the probability of those are actually pretty, pretty high. And so we may also be cut from, cut out from, you know, traditional system where we have access to everything when we need it. So yeah, so talking about that, yeah, I also have some, some silver, silver coins. I may not, not have enough because I have a big family. So this one is particularly, is this silver Canadian coin, $200. And I have more of those. I have, I, I have just, couple of those coins just, just for collectibles. They were kind of bothering me, you know, when I, when I discovered the infinite banking concept for myself because I realized this money isn't working, isn't growing in the policy. But after this happened, after the outage, after this craziness that happened, I look at it a little bit differently. I realize that I may at some point need, need to have access to it because you know, it is, it is what I need to, to pay for stuff. Right. At least this is my last resort. So I'm not saying that everyone should do it. I'm just saying that we need to plan in advance for our future expenses and don't do last minute preparations for your policy loans because you may have some delays, access money from insurance companies, just plan in the future, be wise, you know, think, think, maybe give, give it more, more time just to, just to have enough time on your, in your, in your plate to, to have access to the funds.

Yeah. And, and you know, I mean at present we don't have delays like that that we experience. But the takeaway is that you know, again using the Rogers example, things happen and you just want to recognize that it could take longer and, and further to that. You know, we always suggest that people should plan at least 30 days in advance of their need of capital anyway. We all know that things come up and you, you know, transmission goes on the car. I mean that happens. You didn't plan 30 days that the transmission would go on the car, but you could use a line of credit or visa to pay the mechanic. And then you can make your loan request and then, you know, make sure you're planning with enough time for these things to come in. You know, another thing I think it's helpful to understand is, you know, just circling back to what we talked about, receiving a check and snail mail meaning like you know, you're waiting for Canada Post to deliver your letter to the life company, hey give me my policy loan and you're waiting for them to truck it back on a horse or whatever back to your house. And if you have a, you know, you have a check, it's also important to recognize that there, there are presently anyway some other ways that you might be able to cash that check. So you might be able to exchange. You could sign that check over to some other places. Like sometimes you can even go maybe to the, you know, let's say it was RBC that issued the check from, from someone's, from the account. You don't bank with them, but often you can go and get them to cash that check even though you don't have a, have an account with them because they're the ones that issued the check. So that's an option. Sometimes you can go and do it at a retailer. So even like Walmart, some I've heard does that. There's, there's, they'll do it with not every type of check but pre printed ones, payroll checks, government checks, cashiers checks, you know, these are many of the types that they will do and there probably is other retails that would do that. There's an option maybe that you could load funds onto a prepaid debit card as a possibility. You can go to a check cashing outlet. So kind of like the, you know, the payday marts, payday cash loan type places. I mean you're going to pay a fee for that. But if you don't want, if there's an issue where you're currently unsettled by what's going on in the traditional banking system and you don't want to go and insert more capital there, then there are other ways if you recognize and be creative that you could go and still get that policy loan cash. So just to give you some context on, you know, getting people thinking about what, what are some other options that we can use to still turn that policy loan value that's in a piece of paper into some kind of currency that we can work with?

Yeah, absolutely. And you know what I love about Also being a policyholder is that when this craziness happens, the market may change, the market may go down, especially, you know, telecommunications sector may go down because of this market crash. Investors may panic. Also, they may sell, you know, stocks. And the beauty of it is that I don't really worry of the, you know, telecommunications sector going down if, if, if, you know, because, because in my policy, my cash value is going up regardless of what's happening in the stock market. Right. Because all the risk is with an insurance company. So me being a policyholder, I don't have risk of ups and downs of the market. That's why, yes, I may be temporarily not able to have access to immediately to borrow from the insurance company. Maybe it will delay me a couple days, maybe a couple weeks, but that's fine. My capital is still intact. It is still growing every day, regardless of what's going in the world. Would you not agree, Richard?

Yeah, and I mean, it's also, I mean, in comparison, I think about a contrast to that. And so people often, they think about their equity and their equity. When you hear the words equity, most people think about a house or their home, and the brain usually jumps to home equity. And a lot of times people don't realize that their equity is trapped inside of the walls of their home. And so even considering, in many areas of Canada, we've had these rapidly sharp inclines in the real estate market. And those real estate market inclines have been, yeah, they've been very, very different. Like they've been very changing in dynamic over the course of the last period of time where people are sitting on much more home equity than they had previously they had before, however, if that market shifts. So right now we just had a huge increase with the bank of Canada, the largest increase in, I think they said it was about 20 years, a 1% increase in the overnight lending rate. Well, that's going to immediately reduce the buying power of any new purchaser, any new buyer. So if you're looking at selling a home, you know, in that market, well, now the amount of people that could have bought your home at that price, boom, a whole bunch of them just got eliminated from the marketplace. So supply and demand, supply and demand. You have a supply of a house you want to sell, but the demand for who can actually, the amount of people that can actually close on purchasing the house for the value that you want just got obliterated. So these forces have a way of impacting values in a real estate market. Mostly it's a supply and demand situation, but the interest rate has a cost on borrowing and the payments of cash flow, the monthly payment situation. And so the qualifying criteria increases. And if there's not the income, cash flow to support that, the amount of, you know, you, you could buy this size of house, you know, yesterday and now or two days ago with the bank of Canada increase, now you can only buy this size of house. That's basically what's happened. So anyone that has a size of house that's up above here, the amount of people that are interested or want to buy your house in might still want to buy it. They just can't close on it because the bank won't give them the deal. So recognize that that home equity, it can be frozen and you don't control the size of it. You can control your mortgage pay down, but you can't control the value of the property. Whereas in the power whole life situation, because of its structure, because of its design, because of its contractual nature and the bulletproof guarantees attached to it, that thing is going up each and every day, and you can't stop it. The only thing that stops it is if somebody dies, the insured person, in which case you get more money than you put on anyway, or if you voluntarily, as the owner, choose to collapse it. And that's like, that's like having, that's like having a gold mine that you, that you own. And, you know, you all of a sudden walk over and you decide, you know what? I didn't actually get a chance to put my shovel in here and check and look for any of the gold. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm, I'm just going to close it all out and I'm going to hand it over to somebody else. You know, like, I don't think too many people would want to do that. If you knew for a fact that you had the, you had the reports, you know, the data that, boom, there's gold in that thing. You know, you don't want to, you know, get rid of a gold mine that you, you already have in your hands. So that would be kind of my final thought. And I mean, ultimately, it's important to have these conversations. Roman, you bring a lot to this because of your, your experience living in other countries outside of Canada. And so I think I love having conversations like this with you because there's things that you've gone through that you've seen your family members go through that I have not experienced. I have, I've had it, I've had it really good here, being Canadian my whole life. I've lived here my whole life. You know, I've had a wonderful and amazing life, and I have not had. I know things like that happen in other nations and other countries. You hear about them, but hearing about it and experiencing them is different. So you being able to share your reference point with, with our listeners. Yeah, I just think it's really, really, it's an amazing thing that you're. You're volunteering to do that because your perspective adds a tremendous amount of value.

Thank you, Richard. Yeah. And I just wanted to kind of also finalize my, my thoughts that, hey, we just need to be prepared for the unexpected events. We just need to be a little bit more aware of what's going on in the world where someone can just take a switch and put it down and turn off the lights. But the beauty of it is that our system that we are building, that we grow, our families and businesses is growing regardless. We just need to have a little bit more time potentially accessing this cash. But, hey, to all our clients and our listeners, that's not a huge deal. So we are not, you know, locked out of your money. You, you want to just rest assured that your money is still growing. It is intact. And insurance company has been through all of this crisis and all of this, you know, uncertain times for many, many, many times during, you know, decades and even centuries. So we just need to plan for it. We just need to be aware. We just need to be ready.

Be prepared and be ready. Love it. Roman, thanks again for doing this. This is great. To everyone who tuned in, I hope you had an amazing chat with us today, and we look forward to you tuning in again. Next time, make sure you take a look for some of the other content that'll probably be popping up on the screen here shortly for you. And as always, continue your journey of learning. Cheer.